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If, then, the perfect life is within human reach, the man
attaining it attains happiness: if not, happiness must be made
over to the gods, for the perfect life is for them alone.
But since we hold that happiness is for human beings too, we must
consider what this perfect life is. The matter may be stated
thus:
It has been shown elsewhere that man, when he commands not merely
the life of sensation but also Reason and Authentic Intellection,
has realised the perfect life.
But are we to picture this kind of life as something foreign
imported into his nature?
No: there exists no single human being that does not either
potentially or effectively possess this thing which we hold to
constitute happiness.
But are we to think of man as including this form of life, the
perfect, after the manner of a partial constituent of his entire
nature?
We say, rather, that while in some men it is present as a mere
portion of their total being- in those, namely, that have it
potentially- there is, too, the man, already in possession of
true felicity, who is this perfection realized, who has passed
over into actual identification with it. All else is now mere
clothing about the man, not to be called part of him since it
lies about him unsought, not his because not appropriated to
himself by any act of the will.
To the man in this state, what is the Good?
He himself by what he has and is.
And the author and principle of what he is and holds is the
Supreme, which within Itself is the Good but manifests Itself
within the human being after this other mode.
The sign that this state has been achieved is that the man seeks
nothing else.
What indeed could he be seeking? Certainly none of the less
worthy things; and the Best he carries always within him.
He that has such a life as this has all he needs in life.
Once the man is a Sage, the means of happiness, the way to good,
are within, for nothing is good that lies outside him. Anything
he desires further than this he seeks as a necessity, and not for
himself but for a subordinate, for the body bound to him, to
which since it has life he must minister the needs of life, not
needs, however, to the true man of this degree. He knows himself
to stand above all such things, and what he gives to the lower he
so gives as to leave his true life undiminished.
Adverse fortune does not shake his felicity: the life so founded
is stable ever. Suppose death strikes at his household or at his
friends; he knows what death is, as the victims, if they are
among the wise, know too. And if death taking from him his
familiars and intimates does bring grief, it is not to him, not
to the true man, but to that in him which stands apart from the
Supreme, to that lower man in whose distress he takes no part.
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